In Loving Memory
by ACleverName
Summary: The Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe visit an orphaned boy whose mysterious sickness causes them considerable consternation.


In Loving Memory (v.1)

by Leslie McMurtry

Pinpricks of white danced through the thin material of the blanket, giving his darkness light. The narrow, uncomfortable cot in the ward had nothing to do with planets and constellations, but hiding under the itchy, patchy woollens could simulate summer in a meadow under a big, black sky. He wasn't stupid—he knew it was all an illusion, a reflex to comfort himself—but then he wasn't an easily frightened baby, either, never mind what the spiteful nurses might say.

The make-believe veil of the starry sky was ripped away. "Hey!" shouted Colin, involuntarily.

"Doctor!" cried a woman, equally surprised, in high-pitched retaliation.

Colin looked up, seeing a slim girl—she wasn't very old, but she wasn't a child—in strange clothes that seemed to glow metallic in the dim electric light. She wore an expression of shock on her oval, wide-eyed face, framed in short, dark hair. Colin sat up in bed, tucking his nightshirt beneath the covers, and glared. He didn't want her to see a helpless, bratty child of nine with dull, sandy hair; he wanted her to answer when he barked, "Who are you? Why are you bothering me?"

The girl flushed pink, but before she could answer, a matron swung by on her rounds. "Mr Warner!" she snapped, ignoring the girl. "What did I say about lights out? You'll wake the whole ward."

Colin imagined that, despite the silence marred only by coughs and sighs from the rest of the children, he wasn't waking anybody.

"Oh, do excuse me," said a different voice, a kindly one that was somewhat flustered. Colin craned his neck and saw Matron glaring down a small, tousled man. The man coughed into a spotted handkerchief and lowered his voice obligingly. "I'm terribly sorry. I'm the Doctor, and this is Zoe—"

"I'll just be about my business," said Matron abruptly, turning on her heel, as if the Doctor had chastised her rather than apologized. The Doctor clasped his hands and looked at this Zoe person. "Well, well."

"Doctor," she said, in a chirpy, self-important voice. "This is the one, isn't it?"

"Keep your voice down," said the Doctor, softly.

"He was the one who shouted," replied the girl sulkily.

The Doctor looked at Colin for the first time, the smile disappearing from his face but remaining somewhere in his eyes, which were a vivid blue. "Good evening, Colin."

"How did you know my name?" the boy snapped, before folding his arms across his chest. "What is it you're looking for?"

"We read your files," said Zoe.

"Oh yes? Then can you tell me what's wrong with me?"

Zoe looked uneasily at the Doctor. Without looking away from Colin, the Doctor replied, voice soft and warm. "Zoe, I'd be ever so grateful if you'd find Jamie for me."

"But Doctor—"

The Doctor, nodding encouragingly at Colin, seated himself on the edge of the bed. "Go on, I'll meet you both in the canteen for a cup of tea, hmmm?"

Zoe was gone in a loud clacking of high heels, causing children to stir across the ward. Colin studied the Doctor, as he knew the Doctor was studying him. He wasn't wearing a white coat and if Colin was honest, he didn't look much like a doctor. "Colin, you've just had your ninth birthday, haven't you? You've had to, ah, spend it in the children's ward because you got sick two months ago and no one's yet been able to explain why, is that right?"

"If you've read my chart, you know that's true. Why are you asking me?" Colin, despite his obstreperousness, was getting sleepy and wondered why the Doctor was visiting him at night and not the morning, like the other specialists did.

"I prefer to talk to you," said the Doctor.

"What was Zoe looking for?"

"You're very bright; I thought you might be," said the Doctor. "She was looking for the medal you're wearing around your neck."

Colin suddenly felt cold and tried to hide his surprise. The nurses who gave him sponge baths would know about his medal, which he kept hidden under his nightshirt, but surely it wouldn't have gone into his files? "May I see it?" asked the Doctor. Colin shook his head, but at the same time he unbuttoned his nightshirt and drew the material away from his neck. Oh, it might not look like much to the Doctor—a dull red cloth band with a metal cross stitched on—but Colin fingered the embroidery "In Loving Memory" and felt a wave of relief, warmth, and sadness wash over him.

"In loving memory," said the Doctor. "Was that your father's?"

"Yes," said the boy, snapping to attention and hiding his medal once more. "He was a hero in the War."

The Doctor nodded, looking down. "Does the world spin for you, Colin?"

"What?"

"You've been through an awful lot in a short time, for a boy your age. You wouldn't be the first to have felt a bit caught up in gravity—"

Colin quirked an eyebrow at the Doctor, reaching carefully under his mattress and slowly bringing out his book. "Gravity? The Earth's rotational pull? Is that what you're talking about?"

"Yes," said the Doctor suddenly, eyes flashing. He was still talking in the same low tones, but there was a strange intensity now. He didn't look at the small, tattered book, a star map and introduction to the planets that Colin had in his hands. "You can feel the Earth spinning, can't you, the planet rotating on its axis at—"

"Two-thousand eighty-two point two-nine-three-one-six miles an hour," finished Colin.

"I remember what that was like," said the Doctor. "The day I stood up and felt, for the first time, that what everyone else had told me was true. I observed it for myself."

"That the planet is moving. Not just around its axis but around the Sun as well."

"Yes, well, something like that." Colin noticed the Doctor's eyes were shining and somehow this made his eyes sting, too. He didn't even notice as tears streamed down his cheeks. He hoped none of the other children were awake to see. His mother wouldn't have wanted him to cry. "Brave Colin," she called him.

"I was just a boy, about your age," said the Doctor. "I was always interested in astronomy, you know. Not that we had any choice."

"Please don't take my medal away."

"It's making you sick, Colin," said the Doctor.

"My mother gave it to me."

The Doctor looked down and then offered his handkerchief. "I know."

Colin dumbly took the cloth but made no attempt to wipe his eyes, as if paralyzed. Instead he found himself oddly fixated on the girl Zoe standing across the room, conversing with a boy in a kilt. Even though they were far away, he felt certain he could hear what they were saying. "Och, he's not going to give it up."

"But he must! His mother died just from the time it took to sew that phrase onto the ribbon. The exposure—well, it could have devastating effects!"

"My mother died from influenza," Colin said firmly, folding his hands protectively over the medal.

The Doctor took the discarded astronomy book and thumbed through it. "What would you like to be when you grow up?"

"A teacher," Colin said, his mouth dry. "The headmaster of a school."

The Doctor looked strange, and through the remains of his tears Colin could see bitterness, surprise, and wonder all co-mingling. "Really? I thought you were going to say an astronomer. Or a physicist." He narrowed his eyes. "Are you sure we haven't met before?"

Colin took the book away from him and wiped his face of the dried tears. "I'm very tired," he said. He felt his eyes squeezing shut of their own accord.

"Yes, it's almost midnight," said the Doctor, in a very far away voice. "No stars out tonight, you know. Too much low cloud." His voice was sharp. "You didn't start caring about planets, rotation, stars, any of that, did you, until your mother gave you that medal?" Colin shook his head weakly, eyes still closed. He heard footsteps.

"Can't we just take him with us?" asked Zoe quietly, from the foot of his bed.

"That's out of the question," whispered the Doctor.

"Weel . . . cannae we take his wee medal when he's sleeping . . .?"

Colin's eyes shot open. "Just you try it," he hissed. "I'll scream. That wouldn't make you happy. You don't want to be discovered." The young man's silence betrayed his uneasiness, and Colin knew he was safe—for the moment.

"Your mother wouldn't want you to behave like that," said Zoe primly.

"Well, she's gone," said Colin.

"We're trying to help you," said the Doctor. "And after all, what's important is that you carry the memory of your parents with you, not something physical and ephemeral like a medal."

"He does have a point, Doctor," said the young man. "If it were me—"

"Jamie, do you always have to undermine—?" cried the Doctor, suddenly flustered.

"People in this time period don't part with their mementoes willingly, Doctor," said Zoe, matter-of-factly. Colin could feel himself hating her for some reason, for her cold superiority, her know-it-all detachment. He never would have admitted this, for a boy was supposed to be his father's son in every way, but he'd hated him, too, for just the same reasons. The only person he'd ever loved had been . . .

"Well, it's not safe," said the Doctor broodingly. Again, this insistence on not being safe . . . thought Colin sleepily. "You two, back to the TARDIS." He looked at them seriously, with significance. "I'm going to say goodbye to our young chap here."

Colin had closed his eyes again, drawn further and further into the warm cocoon of sleep, and was only half-aware of the Doctor's friends doing as they were told. "You're not a real doctor," he accused.

"Not a medical one, no."

"I don't want to feel the rotation of the Earth. I'm not interested . . . I think you're very bad to want my medal."

"I don't want it, can't you understand?" cried the Doctor, with an intensity of anguish that made Colin sit up again, wide awake. "I didn't want to do this," said the Doctor, and for a moment Colin thought he was going to hit him. "But we are running out of time and since you're too pig-headed to see sense . . .!"

When the Doctor snapped at him, Colin felt the same terrible shame as when his mother had found out he'd stolen sweets from the shop. His fingers and mouth had been sticky and stained blue-black with liquorice and forever his stomach turned queasy with the taste of anise when he was chastised. Why was the Doctor tormenting him this way? Wasn't it enough that his father had died in the War, making his mother very sad, and then he had lost her, too, to something invisible, a germ, a breath of bad air? A sickness that, all things being equal, should have killed him, too?

The Doctor didn't hit him. He took his hand. "Colin Warner," said the Doctor. Colin thought he was dreaming. He was walking in a field, under the stars like he had imagined underneath the hospital blanket. The infinitesimal dots he'd pretended were constellations had become more than that, comets and meteors that were impossibly colorful. It felt familiar and yet frighteningly foreign. It was the sky he saw in the pages of his book, and yet not. The voice was his mother's and it wasn't. He could feel rotation and knew it was a planet hurtling through space in an orbit, but it wasn't his planet—it wasn't Earth—and yet it was. It was an important day, like a birthday, but—not. Colin _felt _as though he'd just had cake, a delightfully buttery and smooth sponge with tart, homemade jam, and elderflower cordial his grandmother kept in an emerald-colored bottle. But this wasn't a birthday, it couldn't be, because he wasn't hundreds of years old, he was just nine, he was just—

"That was the day—" the Doctor's voice was solemn, "—I felt the planet spinning, for the first time."

Colin accepted it unquestioningly, even as he knew it to be impossible. He handed his medal to the Doctor.

"Thank you. Don't worry, we'll take good care of it."

That was the last Colin remembered of that night; it was the first time since his mother died that he did not dream of war, or stars, or sick children like himself. And when he woke, he could remember nothing about constellations, and even the words in his astronomy book were like Greek to him. There was no sign of the Doctor, and as he quickly recovered from his mysterious illness, he forgot the incident almost entirely.

Except for the times—too frequently in the next years, with the Second War—he went to funerals. Always startling him were the words "in loving memory" from headstones. But they didn't fill him with sadness or terror, only peace and the weird rush of a planet tilting on its axis.


End file.
